


The Strange Dividends of Parapraxis

by daphnaea



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Takes place in the timespan from "Kobol's Last Gleaming" to "Home.", incredibly awkward declarations of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 08:06:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15359967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daphnaea/pseuds/daphnaea
Summary: Starbuck, Apollo, and the fine art of communication.





	The Strange Dividends of Parapraxis

**Author's Note:**

> Written for empirex1020, who requested "post-Kobol's Last Gleaming fic, set anytime after the episode... Somehow Lee finds out about Kara's slip of the tongue when she slept with Baltar. Kara POV and Lee POV would be cool. Bonus points if you can squeeze in Helo and Sharon," and also said "I've yet to come across a fic that dealt with this subject matter in a satisfactory manner." For the record, Empire and anyone else who feels that way should go read leda13's fabulous ["Overheard."](https://leda13.livejournal.com/14822.html) Anyhow, this took too long to write and probably isn't quite what you had in mind, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.
> 
> Originally posted on Livejournal on March 23, 2008.

_To give and to take are two aspects of the same gesture: one hand reaches out and another withdraws. We enter the temple as beggars bearing offerings, we pour libations and prayers upon the same altar. – Sandra, 29th Oracle of Delphi_

Starbuck knew all about the give and take of destiny. The adoring father; gone. The ambitious mother; also a vicious bitch. The pyramid scholarship; the busted knee. Wings and a lover who flew too close to the sun. With that kind of luck, you had to get tough or give up. Kara Thrace was a lot of things, but she wasn't a frakking quitter, even if, while waiting for the inevitable drop of the other shoe, she sometimes felt the need to hurry it along. Still, certain lessons eventually got pounded through her skull. She was a natural gambler, but she knew better than to bet more than she could afford to lose. There wasn't much left after the end of the worlds, and even less that could be replaced. Risking her life had always been easy. But friends were in short supply.

Assholes with roaming hands, however, never seemed to go out of fashion. Baltar was exactly what she'd never wanted and thus precisely what she was looking for. He was small in every way that mattered to her, and he was harmless, and he would stake no more claim on her than on any of the other dozen women he'd bedded since the apocalypse. Or so she had thought until she opened her eyes with the wrong name dying on her tongue and saw his face above her, and it had been obvious that she’d bruised more than his ego. It would have been funny if it wasn't so all-around wretched. She'd really thought a casual tumble with the local slag was something even she couldn't frak up. But somehow you never knew quite what was on the line until the dice had already rolled.

It shouldn’t have mattered anyway. Starbuck didn’t feel shame, particularly not around men like Baltar. Shame was a Kara feeling, a weak feeling, left behind like so much else at the door of that recruitment office on Picon. But slinking through Galactica’s corridors in smudged makeup and a too-pretty dress, it was harder than usual to be Starbuck. She forced herself out of the shadows and pasted on a smirk, but even from the inside it felt stiff. She’d gone from too drunk to not drunk enough somewhere in the vice president’s quarters, amid the stench of cologne and nervous sweat, and she wanted her buzz back. She wanted the whole night back, really, but the gods didn’t trade in do-overs. She’d found a lot of things at the bottoms of bottles. Maybe her self respect would turn up there next.

***

_We are tiny, weightless things, carried by the wind of time. To go back, to stand still, is impossible. We go forward, or we fall to the ground, dead, and the wind goes on without us. – Julius Plank, The Philosophia_

Lee was used to the days when he wanted to murder Kara, and also used to the days when she did her damnedest to get herself blown up. But he really frakking hated the days when both happened at once.

If he stopped walking, he would not be able to keep himself from trying to put his fist through the nearest wall. He could almost feel it, the second of numbness and then the sharp ache spreading out from his knuckles to his wrist, stiffness and then bruising and it would feel so _good_ to think about anything but her. But the walls were structural-strength composite plazisteel, and a pilot with a broken hand wasn’t any pilot at all, so he tightened his jaw in lieu of his fist. _I’m really sorry._ Starbuck never apologized. Not to him. So it should have made him feel better, but it didn’t, because he had no more right to her penitence than to her (nonexistent) chastity. It was like her, he thought, to get around to saying sorry the one time _he_ was wrong.

There was some nursery rhyme he half-remembered about a contrary little girl, phantom syllables tugging at the edge of his thoughts because that was her, wasn’t it – he couldn’t fathom what drove her, half the time, besides some imp of the perverse. What else would have pushed her into the bed of Gaius Baltar, a half-mad squirrel of a man for whom she bore neither affection nor respect? Other than the obvious, of course. Other than him.

He was so intent on _not stopping_ that he didn’t notice he’d missed the turn for CIC until he was almost at the mess hall, and a squeal of high feminine laughter from around the curve broke the rhythm of his steps and set his jaw even further.

“Baltar _said_ that?” an unfamiliar woman’s voice demanded.

“Not to _me,_ ” another voice – Circe, an ECO – replied. “You know how he is. He said it to the frakking coffee machine. But Crashdown was right there in the room, and he told Racetrack down on the flight deck while I was doing post-flight for next Raptor over.”

Without consciously deciding to, Lee lingered back on the blind side of the curve, pretending to adjust the hem of his jacket.

Circe was giggling. “No, but can you imagine it – the two of them there in bed, in the throes of passion – ”

Lee could imagine it.

“ –And you _know_ he’s been panting after her for weeks,” the other voice added.

“Yeah, so there they are, naked as Aphrodite on a clam shell, the moment of ecstasy at hand –“

“Moment of truth, more like –”

“And Baltar’s thinking he never had it so good. _‘Kara,’_ he whispers, _‘Oh Kara,’_ and then she speaks her fateful line…”

“‘Oh, _Lee!’_ ” the other woman moaned enthusiastically.

His pretense at uniform-straightening came to an abrupt halt.

Circe laughed again. “And that – according to Baltar – was the tragic moment when he realized her heart belonged to another.”

“Her _something_ belonged to another, anyway.” A snort. “But seriously, can’t you just imagine Starbuck, lying there, thinking, _Frak, did I just say that out loud?_ That’s just priceless.”

“Admit it, if you were in bed with Baltar, you’d do it too. Honestly, I don’t think the man bathes.”

“But come on – what happened then?”

Circe paused. “I don’t know. Crash said he just started muttering about how he was never _really_ alone, and then he looked like he’d swallowed a bug, and then he left.”

“Yeah, I guess having an ego the size of a small solar system, it is kind of like having company. Do you think he could teach it to fetch?”

“Shit! I’m going to be late for my shift!”

“Yeah, see you!”

Then the clang of a hatch and the sound of retreating footsteps. Lee sagged against the wall. He wouldn’t have believed a word of it if it hadn’t explained so frakking much. _It doesn’t change anything_ , he told himself, knowing it was a lie. Something had already changed. He just wasn’t sure what.

Eight hours later, when he thought about it again, Starbuck was gone and his father was shot and he was sitting in a cell and he laughed (quietly, so as not to wake the President), because he’d been right after all. It hadn’t changed a thing.

***

_Despair is a holy place. It is where we learn to rise though there is nothing to lift us but grace. – the Medean Apocrypha_

It wasn’t until Caprica was light years away again that Kara permitted herself to acknowledge how many times she should have died in the yellowed light of her ruined home. Neck snapped by a blonde robot. Shot and bleeding on a dirt road. Under the knife in a monster’s hospital and gunned down trying to escape it. Starbuck practically lived on close calls, but once in a while they got stuck in her throat. She knew how she wanted to go, and it wasn’t as a science experiment, and it wasn’t for nothing, forgotten somewhere so choked with death that one more body merited not even a footnote.

But she hadn’t died, she reminded herself, shifting her weight to slouch further into the wall of the storage locker where she was resting, mindful of the lingering ache deep in her abdomen. She had come out on top, somehow, again, as always, because that was what Starbuck _did_. Not because she was stronger or smarter or faster or better than anyone else, but just because she refused to entertain the alternative. There was a certain virtue to never knowing when you were beat.

There had been a few seconds, just as she walked onto the _Astral Queen_ , when it had actually felt like coming home. Like she was back where she belonged. Lee had smiled like all was forgiven, and yeah, look how long that had lasted. Classic Starbuck and Apollo. Never could keep the blades bated for long. And Lee always did need someone to blame. For once he may even have gotten it right. If she’d just done her damn job, Boomer would never have gone to the base star. Roslin would still be president. The fleet wouldn’t have split. And here she’d shown up with that chintzy arrow in hand and a grin on her face like that would make up for everything. Not frakking likely.

Kara wrapped her arms around her chest (she hadn’t adjusted yet to the chill of space), and her fingers brushed along the bandage beneath her shirt. She tried not to think about what pieces of herself she may have left behind on Caprica. Maybe she shouldn’t have come back at all. Let Helo guide them to Earth. She could have fought the good fight and gone down shooting, with Sam, who wanted her as she was, without complication, without realizing that she was incomplete. When she’d been with him it had seemed too easy. She hadn’t thought she would miss him so much. She wondered how soon he’d be dead.

The door creaked open, letting a strip of light fall along the metal floor, and her head swiveled automatically toward the intrusion. She’d assumed it was Lee, probably because he never knew when to leave well enough alone, but the figure at the door stood taller than that. Helo. She let herself relax.

“Pull up a crate,” she told him.

He lounged against the wall instead. “Not quite what I was expecting to come back to,” he said.

“The welcome home party isn’t until after the executions.” She gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Just when you think things’ve already gone to hell…”

“It was simpler down there,” he said. “You knew who the enemy was.”

“Maybe,” she said, her eyes cutting to the side. “Or maybe we were wrong.”

Helo shook his head. “Sharon’s not like that. It wasn’t her.”

“Sharon isn’t like what – isn’t like Sharon?”

Even in the dim light she could see his jaw tighten. “She saved us. She’s different. You _know_ that.”

“Maybe. Boomer saved our asses too. But then her programming kicked in. They’re machines, Helo.”

“I love her.”

Starbuck rolled her shoulders. “You say that like it changes things. It’d be cute if it wasn’t so frakked up.”

He gave her an appraising stare. “Got something for you,” he said, and brought his left hand out from behind his back. It held a pyramid ball. “From your boyfriend,” he told her, and tossed it.

She caught it easily. She turned it over, the seams rough beneath her fingers, and for a second the sense memory of sun and exertion was so vivid that she forgot to feel cold.

“Does it change anything?” he asked, earnest, concerned about her somehow despite everything.

“No,” she said, and slid off her crate. She glanced back at him from the doorway. “You might want to check on Sharon. There’re a lot of itchy trigger fingers on this boat.”

***

_Time is the space between cause and effect. – Diana Schumacher, First Principles_

It was at the moment that Kara spat, “Keep it,” and turned her back on him that Lee realized something was really wrong with her, something beyond her usual cocktail of smug insecurity and desperate megalomania. Her pyramid ball fell back into his hands and he squeezed it too hard, angry at her for somehow being the damaged one when _his_ father was shot, when _he’d_ been the one locked in a cell with blood still on his hands, when _he’d_ been forced to choose between what he loved and what he believed in. And she’d managed to leave a traitor and return a hero, her tarnished halo glowing brighter than before.

But he’d promised himself, on one of those long nights in the brig when he would have traded anything to have her swearing at the guards and doing push ups in the next cell over, that if she came back things would be different. He’d told himself that he’d forgive her, and be grateful for her, and learn to be her friend. It had seemed like such a fragile hope, then. But as soon as her voice had crackled over the wireless he thought he should have known all along. Starbuck’s main talent was for doing the impossible and making it look easy.

It didn’t look too easy for her just then, though, as he dropped her ball into her lap and made a joke at her expense and waited for her to turn around, to hit back, to re-engage. But there was just her bitter mockery of laughter.

“The whole thing's stupid anyway,” she muttered, and went back to hurling the ball against the wall as if he’d never been there at all.

Suddenly at a loss, he stared at her back through the chain link fence. Sometimes she’d seemed closer than this when she was back on Caprica, and her voice had been so clear and bittersweet in his head that he’d been sure he could have reached out and touched her. Now she was an arm’s length away, unreachable.

_Ku-thunk, smack._ The ball slapped back into her hands again and he sank down onto the bench behind her. He could feel the warmth of her back past the hard links of the fence, and he glanced back over his shoulder at her, wisps of hair escaped from her utilitarian ponytail softening her profile. “What's up with you, Kara,” he asked. The anger had slid back into its box, and all he wanted just then was to be StarbuckandApollo again, to feel like _something_ in the universe remained intact. “Anything you wanna talk about?”

“Nope,” she told him, but there was that pregnant pause beforehand which meant more than the rote denial. There was something she ought to tell him, and possibly if he pushed hard enough she’d get mad enough to spit it out as a challenge or a blow. But he didn’t want that. It wouldn’t fix anything.

So he rambled on about being her friend instead, in the stupid CAG-knows-best voice that had never succeeded in reassuring anyone, even himself, and when he was done her only response was another _ku-thunk, smack._

He was halfway out of the room and reminding himself that this was what he got for spending his formative years with books instead of people when she called him back, asking about “that middle part,” and he turned around, digging through the blur of mumbled awkwardness, and oh gods, had he actually –

“Did you say you love me?” she asked, up and facing him at last, ready to take some of her own back, voice jagged like she didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh at him or at herself or possibly just throw something at his head.

Lee chuckled and looked away and gods, why was there never a cylon attack when he needed one?

“Lee Adama loves _me,_ ” she said, and he wondered incongruously if this was how she’d felt in bed with Baltar that time, and if so whether it made them even, and then he wondered how many of these near misses they were going to have, these almost-moments and petty disasters when they tripped over their own hearts.

“Of course I love you,” he told her flatly, looking back up at her as the grin drained from her face. “Gods, Kara. This isn’t a _joke_. I loved how you were with Zak and I loved that you missed him as much as I did. I loved that you were still your same lunatic self at the end of the worlds, and I really frakking love that you’re alive right now, despite your best efforts to the contrary. You keep leaving, so I know exactly what this shit heap of a fleet is like without you, and I am _sick_ of it. So yes, I love you, on what seems to be a permanent basis. I suggest you deal with it.”

She was still staring at him in shock from atop her bench when he turned and left the room.

***

_The gods lift those who lift each other. – traditional homily_

Kara kept her gaze fixed on Lee’s back, swathed in that stupid gray-blue camo that would have been more use blending in with the metal crates and walls of the _Astral Queen_ than the trees of Kobol. He was walking beside the president, providing a steadying hand on her elbow when she needed it, which turned out to be most of the time. Apparently being Secretary of Education hadn’t involved much hiking.

Lee hadn’t said much to her since his impromptu declaration up on the ship. He was casually friendly, and smiled at her, and let her go about her business, which was in all ways not what she expected from him. He was supposed to pull on her ponytail and steal her ball and call her names, and in the absence of those prompts she had been unable to determine what he wanted from her.

Possibly he was waiting for her to say something, but what? _I guess you missed me after all?_ But the smart ass come-back didn’t sound right even in her head. _So I met this guy on Caprica…_ But that wasn’t quite the point either. In her more honest moments, she could admit that she was more desperate to save Sam’s life than to share it with him. She had enough lovers’ deaths on her conscience. But his open grin already had the nostalgic patina of memory, distant and safe. _The cylons shot me and drugged me and cut something out of me, and I keep not dying but I don’t know how to live with it._ But there were some things she said only to the gods.

Maybe she should tell him that she always laughed at men who said they loved her. Mostly because they clearly didn’t even know her well enough to understand they didn’t have to say it to get in her pants. Whatever hid in their eyes when they looked at her wasn’t the kind of love she knew, dangerous and desperate and soaring.

As if on cue, Lee glanced back at her, eyes flashing like sunlight despite the cloudy day. Having ascertained her position, he returned his attention to the president, and if she’d had the energy she’d have stuck her tongue out at his back, but the terrain had just steepened, and marching up mountains was tough on half-healed gut wounds. She set her jaw and picked up the pace.

***

_Fleet as a hart is my love, swift as a river, / Yet I reach, I gain, my outstretched fingers brush / The wheat-gold fringe of her windblown hair – Song of Daphne (author unknown)_

Lee had decided to give Kara some space. It took her a while to process anything emotional, and that interval was usually marked by either inebriation or a surly recalcitrance that made her difficult company. As no alcohol had been forthcoming, he felt it prudent to stay out of her way. And other than shooting him the occasional appraising glance, she’d stayed out of his as well.

But at the end of their first day on Kobol, she looked too exhausted to start a fight, and there was really no one else in their expeditionary party with whom he cared to share a meal, so he dropped down beside her at the high end of their improvised camp and leaned back against the trunk of she tree she’d picked.

“You could wish the gods liked mountains a little less,” he said, digging a ration bar out of his pocket.

“You could wish a lot of things,” she replied. “Never made a frakking bit of difference that I could see.”

“I love how you always look on the bright side of things,” he said, only belatedly realizing that his word choice may have been less than ideal.

Her gaze had sharpened. To fill the awkwardness, he took a bite of the bar, ignoring the sweet nutty taste he’d never grown to like.

“Ok, I give,” she said at last, still watching him.

He frowned. “I’m sorry?”

“I give up,” she elaborated. “I don’t get it. So just tell me. What the hell did you mean when you said,” she glanced around as if afraid someone might overhear, “what you said. Before.”

His face split into a grin. If he’d imagined this scene a month ago he would have cringed with anticipatory mortification, but in actuality he felt better than he had in ages. He thought he should try the direct approach more often. “I thought it was pretty self-explanatory, Kara, but if you like I could try to find some smaller words –”

She slapped his arm. “I know what you _said,_ you moron. I want to know what you meant by it.”

He gave her a puzzled look. “I didn’t _mean_ anything by it.”

A peculiar look broke across her face. “So it was like a joke.”

_“No.”_ He dropped his head back against the tree trunk. “Of course I meant it.”

“But why did you _say_ it?” she demanded.

He raised his head to look at her, but her face revealed only suspicious incomprehension. “Well, to communicate, I guess. Which sometimes we don’t do very well, like right now, for example. Things with us can be… murky. So I just wanted to be sure that you knew. In case there was any confusion.”

“Oh.” She lapsed into silence for long enough for him to finish the ration bar. Darkness had fallen completely by the time she spoke again. “So… now what?”

“What happens now? I don’t know. What do you want to happen now, Kara?”

She drew back against the tree. “I don’t know,” she said, looking more than usually like a half-wild animal crouched at the edge of a forest, weighing instinctive fear against the scent of a cook-fire.

“Bizarre as this is to say, I think you are actually worse at this than the robot over there,” he told her, gesturing toward the shelter off to his right where Helo and Sharon were talking softly. “But if you don’t know, then I guess nothing happens. We just go on being friends. Easy, right?”

“So I don’t have to say it too?” she asked grudgingly.

He laughed. “Since when does Kara Thrace _have_ to do anything?”

“Ok,” she said. She stared at him for another few seconds, then got out her gun and a cloth and set to work cleaning it. He followed suit, happy enough for the moment just to sit with her and not argue.

“I might,” she said after a minute of companionable silence, still hunched over her weapon. “I mean, if I had to say, one way or the other, then maybe I do. Too.”

“Ok,” he said, and bumped her leg gently with his knee.

She nudged him back, then resumed her task, her leg still resting against his.


End file.
